Somebody wake me up on this please on this discussion. (See references at end).

1. If we look on the streets of any city in the Global South, we see de facto PRT, personal rapid transport, all over the place.

2. In the form of cheap motorized two wheelers with pretty energy-efficient engines, enough road space to get the trip done, and free parking right next to where you want to go.

3. There is no way that the old mid-20th century PRT Pod folks can even start to compete with that.

4. But if this is the on-street reality, which of course it is, please show me the city or research program that is showing the way in getting the most out of this stubborn reality.

5. Who is making the best things about it better yet?

6. And who is getting some kind of control of the worst?

We need a new policy paradigm for this, let’s call it, the people’s PRT. Of course it’s part of the problem, but it is also clear that it is a major part of the solution, as anyone with even an ounce of experience and common sense can see. And policy makers, advisors and proponents of sustainable cities we will continue to ignore it at our peril.

Take the city of Kaohsiung as just one salient example: 1.5 million people, 1.2 million scooters, and something like three quarters of the modal split. And all this in parallel with an absolutely gorgeous new state of the art six billion dollar metro that started to go out of business on Day 1 of its opening and ever since, because it simply cannot compete in terms of trip time, convenient or price.

Shouldn’t we be working on this – along with the on-street reality options such as BRT, HOV access, parking control, strategic speed control, safe walking and cycling, and all that we know are parts of the solution — instead of wasting our time with these long disproven, whack-a-mole PRT proposals that clearly have no place in our cities

How to get the message across to the policy makers and politicians?

This has been good fun, but Brendan Finn has it right. These PRT enthusiasts are distracting us at a time when we need all our brains and focus for the real stuff. Out they go.

Note on the poll results: Worth noting that the poll has in the last 24 hours been contaminated by no less than 106 visits from a single Comcast Cable site in one identified city in the United States, with the result that exactly 65 votes have been recorded from the one site in favor of PRT as a solution. Now that has to show something. (It’s a bit sad actually. The poll will be properly cleansed before finalization. In the meantime we will leave them in, just so it looks like a real horse race.)

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8 thoughts on “Editorial: Will the real PRT please stand up”

Dave and Eric, you are both on to something here — M2W
(scooters/motorcycles/mopeds) are gaining share in many emerging
markets, AND they have some problems too as both of you have pointed
out.

Compared to a car, a motorcycle or freeway capable scooter can achieve
much higher efficiencies and load factors (as proven by motorcycles in
California (where lane splitting is legal) doubles lane capacity
compared to single occupant cars). Consider a car with an empty weight
of 1000kg, a 1500cc 5 cylinder engine capable of safely seating 5
persons. Now consider 5 scooters each with a single cylinder
(identical to the car’s cylinder of 300cc each). The scooters each
have two seats of capacity *5 = 10 total seats capacity, and have a
mass of 150kg * 5 = 750kg (250kg less material).

At 100% load factor (all seats filled) the car gets 40mpg * 5 =
200pmpg, the scooters get 100mpg *2 = 200pmpg (no change in energy
efficiency) BUT the scooters have double the capacity and 5 times the
granularity. AND it is clear that the emissions would be about the
same (remember we are using the same cylinder).

Now add Daves ideas of: fully enclosed road PRT (oops i mean scooters)
that use electric or hybrid power. Such vehicles (we call them MoPods
tm (instead of mopeds) can have much better aerodynamics (and less
weight too) offering further energy and material savings compared to
cars and scooters. In the rain, the MoPod occupants do not get their
hair and suit messed up on the way to their up-and-coming professional
job.

(Stay with me now) — As proven by the California PATH program (of
automating car lane following / speed / spacing / merge / diverge /
braking / etc.) lane capacity can be increased by up to 5 times, and
rush-hour speed doubled by using automation or “intelligent
transportation” (IT). Applying this to the “MoPods” could yield
similar benefits.

Now, hopefully you are all still with me — now things can get real
interesting. Instead of competing with non IT vehicles on roads, what
if we borrow from what is proven technology in the for-profit ski
industry?

1st some BACKGROUND INFO:
In the early days of down-hill ski areas in the EU and USA, a road was
built to the top of the mountain and a bus would haul the skiers to
the top of the hill. Then it was discovered that a couple of cables
with a bunch glorified lawn chairs tied on could do a much faster and
more convenient job of moving people to the top of the hill at much
less cost than a road, bus, and driver. Ski areas adopting cable
suspended automated people movers made a lot more money, and soon that
was all that survived. Skiers were happy (no waiting for another 29
skiers to fill the bus, much faster, cheaper ticket cost, and they did
not have to risk catching the flu from the one sick guy on the hill).

What if such “ski lift” cables could be suspended across cities, on
existing buildings, electric poles, bridges, and light poles? What if
such cable suspended systems had means for automatically attaching to
the top of a MoPod such that the MoPod could be carried several km
across the city — above all the cars and buses competing for space of
the streets below? What if the MoPods could be released from the
cable on to a ramp at any bus stop along the cable route without
disrupting the trip of 29 other users? What if they could be “picked
up” in like manner from any “bus stop”? What if the cable would
charge your batteries as it carried you in your own MoPod? What if
this could be built for less than a tenth of the cost of building a
special bus lane?

Some of the many cost advantages compared to buses and trains are:
less labor, less energy, less infrastructure, less maintenance, less
cost per seat (and the user pays this cost — not the tax payer who
may not be able to use the system). From the users perspective, they
use their own MoPod vehicle for the entire trip — only using the
system when it makes sense for them (energy cost, lower per-mile cost,
and time savings are the main reasons to use the cable suspended
public part). Parking is much less of a problem than with cars
(MoPods are so light weight they can be stood up vertical for minimal
parking footprint for not much more space needs than a bike).

This is NOT rocket science (but rocket science can be applied too —
see our ET3 system), aPRT is NOT what it was 30 years ago. You all
owe it to your selves as transportation professionals to FULLY
understand what many of you are unreasonably opposed to — you might
even get to keep or improve your jobs (unless you are secretly on the
payroll of outmoded train or bus manufactures)!

Now what if your MoPod could drive into an empty ET3 capsule and be
automatically routed to any major city on earth in 4 hours or less
(while using less than 1/50th as much electrical energy per passenger
as the most efficient electric train or electric car)? THE “REAL” aPRT
STANDS UP! Don’t just blast it with emotion based arguments — get
out you calculators (or slide rules if i have some of you pegged
right), and prove that trains, buses, and bikes are better than the
real PRT.

Scooters and the like may be “personal” and “rapid” but they are hardly
“transit”.

I believe that the following are essential requirements for an adequate
transport system.

1. No dependence on individual vehicle ownership.

2. No dependence on travellers being able to drive safely.

3. Vehicles must not obtrude on the use of public space to more than a limited
extent.

4. The system must be energy efficient and not too polluting.

5. The system must cater for people’s travel needs, though possibly not as well
as they might like (which is probably impossible).

A car based system is based on the principle of prioritising 5 over all the
others. It does not seem to me that a scooter based system would score much
better. Bicycles are much better — they don’t serve 5 so well, but serve 3 and
4 much better, and a Velib type system can satisfy 1 as well. But 2 seems to me
to be much harder.

Conventional public transport can satisfy all 5 requirements — even if no 5 is
served less well than by a car based system. So can PRT in theory, but it is
unproven technology and belongs with multi-modal vehicles (road railers,
amphibious buses etc.) and airships in the realm of ideas that should be filed
away for possible future use when their practical problems have been ironed out.

I have encountered PRT advocates who seem to think that there is no need to
consider any other solution to our transport problems. I believe that they are
being completely unrealistic, but I don’t think that means that PRT itself
should be dismissed as something that can never work.

3. Vehicles must not obtrude on the use of public space to more than a limited
extent.

4. The system must be energy efficient and not too polluting.

5. The system must cater for people’s travel needs, though possibly not as well
as they might like (which is probably impossible).

Conventional public transport does very poorly on these three requirements

Regarding (3): Railway lines brutally divide cities. There’s one near where I live, and it cuts off two potentially convenient short cuts I would be able to take if it were not there. Its noise adversely affects property values on nearby streets. Trains and their catenaries are visually very obtrusive. Buses are not much better. They’re big, noisy and smelly. They require roads, of course, but so do cars.

Regarding (4): Most mass transit is barely more efficient than private cars, if at all. There are a few exceptions which are efficient because of very high load factors. Most systems, especially away from the largest cities, cannot achieve the load factors that would make them efficient.

Regarding (5): This is the worst aspect of mass transit. Instead of taking people directly where they want to go when they want to go there, mass transit takes people wherever is convenient for the transit system, at whatever time is convenient for the transit system, by whatever devious route happens to be convenient for the transit system. In the best cases, the mismatch between what the passenger wants and what the transport system wants add 30-50% to journey times, relative to private transport (including the bicycle for fairly short journeys). More often it doubles the journey time, or worse. If one’s destination is out of the way, of if one wishes to travel at night or at the weekend, there may be no available service at all. Apart from getting people where they want when they want to go there, there are also the problems of comfort (generally very poor), and privacy (usually nonexistent).

Peraves. An electric version of their streamlined, enclosed motorbike design, which they’ve been manufacturing since the mid-80s, was a successful finalist in the automotive X-Prize, winning $2.5 million. It is simultaneously one of the greenest and one of the coolest ways to move around (see http://peraves.wordpress.com/)

6. And who is getting some kind of control of the worst?

Google. The biggest problem with scooters is that they’re very dangerous to ride. If the job of driving can be taken over by a computer, it can potentially be made a great deal safer.

One problem that no-one is currently solving is that of crossings and intersections. Crossings are the main cause of collisions and fatalities in all transport systems, and even without the accidents, they slow traffic down enormously. If every crossing were turned into an overpass/underpass, traffic flow would be much smoother and much safer.

These PRT enthusiasts are distracting us at a time when we need all our brains and focus for the real stuff. Out they go.

Who are they distracting? Scarcely anyone notices PRT. By far the worst distraction in transport is mass transit, especially urban railway systems. Railway enthusiasts are encouraging governments and municipalities to install boondoggle transit systems that waste many billions around the world every year, while barely making a dent, if even that, in our transport and energy problems. The Kaohsiung MRT system that you mention is just one of many examples.

I take your point Bruce about the dangers and system problems associated with intersections. In today’s transport mode. Yes, something really should be done – and there are many ways to tackle it.

That said, to go from there to ” overpass/underpass” solutions, is a big jump. Sure, let’s have a look at them as one possible option, but let’s not neglect the others. We look closely and may the best solution win.

Roundabouts help to a degree. The obvious problem with overpasses and underpasses is expense. They’d be quite cheap if only scooters were going to use them, but they usually have to be built for trucks and buses, too.

To my mind we really have to check out all the options, and there are many. I wish I had time to run down the list. But one of them — that I happen too like very much — is to get rid of at least half of all the traffic signals, some minor shifts in the approach, slowing the traffic, and getting people to use direct eye contact (only possible at lower speeds). THere is a whole structure behind that, and if I can find a couple of references (unlikely given my work load today) I will try to post them.

That removing signage and markings has safety benefits is as yet unsubstantiated by any robust research. If it has benefits at all, the benefits are small. Anyway, it’s not a solution to the world’s traffic problems by any stretch. It’s just tinkering.